Consequences
by rabidsamfan
Summary: Some missing scenes from the end of the BBC version of Hound of the Baskervilles, which Protector of the Grey Fortress inspired me to watch with the story "Closing the Case". As usual, I don't own the characters, I'm just messing about. T for gore.
1. Lestrade

**Lestrade:**

I was just starting to come round as Doctor Watson pulled himself to his feet, and I watched him, waiting for the room to stop spinning. "Where's the prisoner?" I asked.

"Escaped," said he. "Holmes went after him." There was blood running down his arm and a hole in his sleeve, but when I went to mention them to him he only shook his head and bent down to pick up his revolver from the floor. "I'm all right. And you?"

"I'll be fine in a bit," I told him and started to make my way upright.

"Miss Stapleton is dead." The words came out of him like they were tearing him in half. "Her body is in the shed. See to her." And then he tucked his left hand into his coat, like Bonaparte in a picture, and away he goes while I'm still trying to find my feet.

Well, I couldn't leave it at that, could I? So out I went too, and followed the blood trail he left behind to the gate that led onto the moor. I was fair dizzy, and for a moment I admit I did think as I might meet that horrible hound again in the fog, but then I remembered that Mr. Holmes had said it was dead, so I went on, feeling the loss of my revolver quite sore. I hadn't got far when I heard a shot ahead of me, still some ways off. I didn't know whether to run towards it or away, and that's the truth, and in the end I just kept creeping along in the doctor's wake and hoping that I wouldn't lose the path. 

I found all three of them by a patch of bog. Stapleton or Baskerville, whichever you might call him, he was dead as a doornail, a nice neat hole in his head and my barker still held tight in his hands, finger on the trigger like he'd been a-ready to shoot. Holmes he was covered in mud to his chin, and nearly asleep with cold, and the Doctor! Good Lord but that man was a mess. He hadn't done a thing for the hole in his arm and his coat was off him on the ground and blood still coming out of him like he had it to spare. I knelt down beside him and got out my kerchief to tie round his arm while I yelled at Holmes to wake himself up and do some good.

They both groaned and moaned at me, but they roused, and between us Holmes and I got the doctor back into his coat, for he'd started to shiver. We got him to his feet, and would have put him between us but his bad arm won't allow for that, not even when it's not bleeding, so it was Holmes in the middle holding up Watson and me holding up Holmes and God knows it was the doctor steering, for by that point he knew the path better than either of us and my head was hurting so bad that all I wanted to do was stop and lie down. You'd have thought we'd go back to Merripit House for it was closer, but by then all either of the other two wanted was to get to Baskerville Hall. 


	2. Barrymore

**Barrymore:**

Doctor Mortimer had no sooner got poor Sir Henry sewn up and we were heating water for to bathe him and put him to bed when there came another cry for help outside the Hall. Perkins was bringing the hipbath down from storage,and Mary Jane and my wife were in the kitchen making up a posset, so I left Sir Henry with the Doctor and went to the door myself, dreading to think what I might see. I found Mr. Holmes struggling through the moor gate with two half-conscious men, and while I didn't know the one I had come to know the other over his stay. Mr. Holmes wouldn't let me take Dr. Watson though. He passed me the stranger -- Inspector Lestrade he said his name was -- and then picked up his friend and tucked him over one shoulder like a man carrying a lamb. Dr. Watson protested, saying he could walk, but Mr. Holmes just hushed him, saying, "Save your strength for bleeding."

In we went as quick as we could go. Dr. Mortimer had called to Perkins to help and so he did with my burden, but Holmes never took a bit of aid, not even when we got inside and you could see in the light that he'd been soaked with mud.

"We'll need more water," said Dr. Mortimer, looking the three of them over. "What did you do, man? Fall into the Mire?"

"I'm cold and wet," Holmes said. "And I believe Lestrade to be concussed. But Watson is wounded, and the bullet is still in his arm."

Dr. Mortimer scowled, and went to clear a chair by the fireplace, but Sir Henry had heard and he pushed himself up to make room on the table. "Put him here," he ordered, sounding more like Sir Charles than he had in all the time he'd come to Dartmoor. "Put him in the light."


	3. Dr Mortimer

**Dr. Mortimer**

My one patient was suddenly four, although I was glad to see that none of these three were hurt as badly as Sir Henry. I had Barrymore put Lestrade into a chair by the fire with a basin, for he'd been sick once and was green enough to be so again. Holmes put Watson on the table, as he'd been bidden by Sir Henry and set about getting Watson's coat off while I steered Sir Henry into the nearest chair. I'd have rather put him to bed, but he insisted on staying and only made allowances for Barrymore and Perkins to begin to clean him up for his nightshirt.

Holmes I tried to banish to a bath as well, knowing that the worst of nearly drowning in mud is the cold that seeps into the bones. But he wouldn't go. Just stood and held the candelabra, so as to give me better light as I tended to Watson. The bullet that had hit him must have come from a small calibre pistol, but it had done damage enough. The arm had started to swell, and there was mud as well as blood to be dealt with, but Watson assured me it wasn't half so bad as what he'd had before. Seeing the scar on his shoulder and getting a clear look at the misshapen lump of the bone beneath it, I had reason to believe that he was telling the truth. But the first shock was wearing thin and I could see him looking for something to distract his mind while I was cleaning out the wound with carbolic and extracting the bullet from where it had lodged beside the bone. His eye fell on Sir Henry. 

"I'm sorry," he said. "She's dead."

"Miss Stapleton?" Sir Henry gasped. "Beryl?" 

"He killed her," Watson confirmed grimly, and I could not be sure that his tears were due to the pain.

"She was not his sister, she was his wife," Holmes intervened, but neither Watson nor Sir Henry seemed to hear him. I nearly dropped my suture needle.

"What about him?" Sir Henry asked. 

"Dead too." Watson's eyes drifted closed for a moment. "I shot him."


	4. Perkins

**Perkins**:

For a moment there I weren't sure which of 'em I'd have to catch. Dr. Mortimer, he turned near as white as Sir Henry did, and I can't say as I didn't feel my own heart head for my boots. The Stapletons dead? And married one to the other? Why, I'd seen her into a carriage time and again and him too and no hint of nothing like love. That he'd killed her I could believe for he was the sort that would rather put a pin through a butterfly's heart than let it go on giving joy to the rest of us, but loved her? No. She'd brightened more at the sight of Sir Henry or Dr. Watson or even old Mortimer than she had for him.

Holmes had paled too, when Dr. Watson said that he'd shot Jack Stapleton and he shot a look to the stranger in the chair by the fire before he bent to take hold of Watson's good shoulder. "He would have shot me if you hadn't," he said, and the stranger sat up a little more, listening.

"I should have killed him sooner," Watson replied, and grimaced as Dr. Mortimer made another stitch in his arm.

"Shoot an unarmed man under the eye of a Scotland Yard detective?" Holmes said, with a quirk of a smile. "You wouldn't have thanked me for allowing it at your trial. Lestrade would have had to arrest you. His duty would have demanded nothing less."

"I may have to yet," said the stranger. "But I doubt it will come to anything more than a coroner's inquest. He'd admitted his guilt when he stole my gun and escaped."

Sir Henry was trembling under my hand. He stared at Holmes. "But why?" he cried. "Why has all this happened? You said the danger was past!" 


	5. Sir Henry Baskerville

**  
**

**Sir Henry Baskerville:**

As much morphine as Dr. Mortimer had put into me my head was still a ball of pain, but my heart hurt worse to know that Beryl was dead. I could see that Watson felt the same way. For all the stiff-upper lip talk my father used to give me about Englishmen I'd found him nearly as easy to read as any Yank or Canuck. But Holmes... My God, did nothing touch the man? He shook off my question like a horse twitching away flies. "I'm sorry, Sir Henry," he said perfunctorily. "I thought we'd be able to forestall the hound before it ever reached you. I was not expecting your cousin to have found a creature of that size."

My cousin? But I did not have the strength to think on it. "If I'd known there was danger I'd have carried my pistol," I said. "She might be alive."

"It wasn't your fault," Watson said, but he was looking at me, not Holmes. "There was nothing you could have done. She was so cold when I found her..." He tried to sit up and turn away, but Holmes held him down and for a moment I thought I saw something human in the detective's eyes.

"It was not your fault either, Watson," he said. "Now hold still and let the doctor work or you won't be able to use that arm at all."


	6. Watson

**  
**

**Watson:**

For a moment I thought that Holmes might remember the remorse he'd felt when we'd found poor Selden's body on the moor.  But no, her death had yet to touch him.  I groaned and tried to hold still as Dr. Mortimer plied his needle, grateful to Holmes for his hand upon my other shoulder, and angry with him too, for not understanding.  It was my fault.  Of all men in the world, I should have known that once the distraction of the convict's death had been dismissed Holmes would return to his goal of completing the case against Stapleton with all the merciless force of a needle drawn to a lodestone.  By his calculations the woman had been a co-conspirator, however unwilling, and not a victim.  But he had never seen the fear in her eyes.  He had not seen her corpse.

A thousand different solutions seem to spin behind my eyelids.  Instead of convincing twelve stolid jurors we'd had only to convince Henry Baskerville.  We could have found a way to steal Beryl from her brother.  She could have testified... no, no, not as wife.  She couldn't have testified against him.  Holmes had made that calculation before me, damn his cold heart.

The needle scraped against a nerve and again my whole instinct was to move away from it.  Holmes lay his other hand on my forehead to steady me, and my eyes flew open at the iciness of his touch.  It was not only his heart that was cold.  "You need to get warm, Holmes," I warned him, realizing only then that the trembling I felt was not all my own.  "You're shivering."

"In a moment," he said coolly and looked to Dr. Mortimer.  "Have you much farther to go?"

"A few stitches," Mortimer said.  "I'm sorry to take so long, Watson, but I've so little catgut left after sewing up Sir Henry that I must make best use of it."

I closed my eyes and forbore telling him that I'd been reduced to using threads teased out of the ragged edges of blankets and soaked in carbolic to sew up the men in my care at Maiwand, that there were probably still knots under my skin from the inexpert job my poor orderly had done on me in my turn.  He'd made one of the water carriers hold me down while he sewed, much the way that I was being held now.  The poor fellow had been hit in the head by another shot from the Ghazis.  For a moment memory twisted and I felt and tasted again the splattered bits of brain and blood.

"Holmes!"


	7. Holmes

**Holmes: ****  
**

"Easy, Watson, easy. I'm right here." I held Watson down by main force as Barrymore ran to see what had crashed to the floor in the kitchen and after a long moment the words seemed to reach him. The pain had my poor biographer drifting near the edge of consciousness, but the stubborn fool wasn't going to let himself faint, that was clear enough. I looked to Mortimer. "Have you no morphine left at all?"

"I used what was in my bag already," Mortimer grunted, as he tried to repair the damage that Watson had done with his sudden panic. "Perkins... no, blast it, you've got to help with Sir Henry. Can Mrs. Barrymore go to my surgery and fetch fresh supplies?"

"I'll have to put the pony in his traces for her," Perkins said.

"That will take time." I fumbled through the mud in my pockets until I found what I was looking for. "Here, try this." I handed the half-empty vial to Mortimer carefully, not wanting to drop mud onto the areas he'd already cleaned.

"I'm all right, Holmes," Watson mumbled insistently.

"Of course you are, old fellow," I told him, but I took hold of his shoulder again. "But I think Sir Henry would prefer it if we arranged for you to stop dripping blood on his furniture."

Mortimer wiped the vial clean with a rag and pulled free the cork, sniffing at it with a frown and then touching a bit of the liquid to his tongue. "Cocaine?"

"A mild solution -- only seven percent. But better than nothing at all, I should think."

"Dreadful stuff," Watson grumbled.

"It has its uses."


	8. Lestrade again

**Lestrade again:**

I'd wondered often enough if Holmes hadn't been a-using cocaine of late, so I can't say as I was shocked that he'd come up with some of it from his pocket. More surprised, I'd say, that he was willing to admit as much in front of a roomful of folk that didn't know him the way that Dr. Watson and I do. I can't say as I'm sure that Sir Henry or the groom caught on, Dr. Mortimer knew what was what -- his back went as stiff as the poker from the fireside. But he poured the stuff onto a pocket handkerchief and held it against Watson's arm and by God it did the trick. Made me wish there were enough left to pour on my head to watch the pain leave the Doctor's face like that.

He's a hard cold man, Sherlock Holmes, and if he looked at the world the same way as the rest of us I doubt as he'd be a genius. Takes on cases as makes even the most hardened of us Scotland Yarders want to run home and hide under the covers, and God knows we've each of us got our ways of shuffling off the horrors of the job. With me it's my wife and kids, but Holmes is no more likely to marry than he is to fly to the moon. If cocaine's what keeps him from cracking like a block of ice then he can have it for all of me, I decided, and knew then and there that I wasn't going to be asking. He could have been carrying it for the doctor, since Watson's medical kit was back with our luggage in the stand of trees near Merripit House, and that was a good enough excuse as any.

The thought of my luggage, and my nightshirt still in it reminded me that we had things to do before we could rest. I looked again at Holmes and knew my mind had been a-wandering, for he'd closed his eyes and was holding his jaw tight shut to keep his teeth from chattering, though his hand was still on Watson's shoulder. "How are we going to get fresh clothes tonight?" I asked him. "Our bags are still over where we left them."

Holmes started and blinked at me. "I'll go and fetch them," he said.

But Watson brought up his unhurt hand and caught Holmes' wrist. "No. I forbid it. You'll stay and get clean and warm. Even if it means wrapping up in a blanket afterwards. I mean it, Holmes. I haven't the strength to deal with you and pneumonia too."

For a moment I thought he'd struck the same spark into the gunpowder as Holmes had when he'd forbid him to fetch out Sir Henry, and I held my breath, waiting for Holmes to explode. But only for a moment. Holmes was too cold for anger. He freed his wrist gently enough and smiled down at the wounded man. "If you insist, Watson," he said. "I can't say that I was looking forward to the ride."


End file.
